ATR is offerning an exhaustive parsing of Peter Beinart's lies overstatements on WMDs in his interview with Kevin Drum. Go check it out, it's definitely worth the read.

But this brand of fact-checking is a hallmark of the modern Republican ideologue. Rather than testing a hypothesis, they begin from an unwavering opinion and then cherrypick the information supporting it while discounting evidence to the contrary - regardless of how preponderant it may be.

At best this is simply poor scholarship, at worst it is a concerted revisioning of a means vs. ends argument; the very revisioning that totalitarian regimes have always espounded.

It reminds me of that quote by Hannah Arendt, "Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself."